


how brightly burned their lantern

by noahfronsenburg



Category: Final Fantasy XV, 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia
Genre: Blood and Injury, Chronic Illness, Crossover, FFXV: Comrades, M/M, Parallels, Starscourge (Final Fantasy XV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-29 12:14:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17203211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noahfronsenburg/pseuds/noahfronsenburg
Summary: He squints into the storm, and he sees a light.





	how brightly burned their lantern

**Author's Note:**

> this was written for the erasermight twilight zine sometime last year, idr exactly whenabouts. this zine was a lot of fun even if it never quite got off the ground, and i really enjoyed being able to write this. one of the only (if not the only?) crossover ive ever done, ahaha

1.

 

The house is not empty, but it would be sort of easier if it was. The lantern is not out, but Shōta almost wishes that it was. The ghost is still there, but he gets darker every day, and Shōta’s not sure how much he can hang on. The sky is always dark. The stars are always out. The night is always darkest right before the dawn, and the dawn never comes.

 

 

2.

 

The scar is still on his side when he comes back to Lestallum. That is most of what lets him know the whole thing was real. It’s raised—it’s not infected, but it is swollen and tender to the touch and just a little pinker than the usual tan of his skin, paler and grayer from six years without the sun. it heals totally after a month, with the help of potions and proper medical care, and two months after that, he takes another hunt, and goes out on his own. Drives his own truck.

He drives back to the house. He left it somehow, but he’s still not sure. He doesn’t really remember much of that—he was running a low-grade fever, a minor head injury, and things are hazy. But he was found at the side of the road alone, and alive. In the world they live in now, the light and life of Eos swallowed up and lost, any life being spared has been a gift. Precious, priceless. Everyone, everywhere, has lost a father, or a mother, or a sister, or a brother, or a friend, or a cousin, or a lover.

Shōta has lost less than more people, and more than some. Nobody wants him dead, and they are glad he lives.

He returns to the house on his own, and finds it not in a storm. He keeps his hand on his whip, not wanting to be unarmed, and climbs out of the side of the truck, raises his headlamp over his head. It’s still inhabited—the daemons don’t seem interested in going too near to it, edging around the perimeter of what is probably the original lot, staked out by some long-lost surveyor before the acreage was first purchased—and there is a light on in the front window, the curtains pulled shut.

He climbs the front path. The light in the lantern is still on, the bulb not even flickering. It must be battery powered, because this far out from the city, without connection to one of the many wayposts that dot the Lucian countryside, there’s no electricity. Or maybe it’s an old generator that recharges it sometimes, on its last, sputtering legs. The interior is lit with flickering—candles. Probably bartered. Or logs, old firewood.

Shōta reaches the door and knocks, and it opens a moment later.

 

 

3.

 

The fire flickers. It’s warm, and the light it casts over the backs of his eyelids is yellow and gold and orange and _alive,_ in the way the sun used to be. Every inch of his body throbs, aches, smarts. The gash up his side, bleeding, aches. “Just a little longer,” the man with the big hands tells him, voice soft, soothing. Like he’s talking to a wild animal, and maybe, after all this time in the dark, maybe Shōta is. “Hold still. I’ll be finished.”

The needle stitching him shut punches into his flesh, and it pulls on the gash. His breath stills in his lungs and he counts his heartbeats, willing them to slow, steady. He wishes he was still unconscious, for it would hurt less. The press of the man’s fingers between his ribs steadies his nerves, helps him find something, anything, to hang onto. “There we go,” the man says. “There we go.”

The last stitch slides shut, and the thread pulls, tightening, the needle dragging on Shōta’s flesh. “Breathe,” the man says, and cuts the thread.

The bleeding has stopped. The infection, the rot, won’t creep in any further. Shōta closes his eyes.

 

 

4.

 

The man is taller than Shōta remembers—but, then again, he wasn’t really himself last time he was here. He was barely alive, dying of blood loss. He is tall, and his hair is wild and blond and his eyes are blue, blue, blue, the bluest Shōta has ever seen.

“I,” the man says, and looks around in confusion, spies Shōta’s car. “Did you drive here?”

“Looking for you,” Shōta says. “I’m here to take you back to Lestallum, or at least an outpost. Civilians aren’t supposed to be out here by themselves.” Hell, he isn’t supposed to be out here by himself. Nobody is. Buddy system. People who come out here alone die, get picked up by daemons, stalled miles from the road or help or light or signal or campsites and die there. “I can help you move if you don’t want to leave your things.”

The man smiles sadly.

“Thank you,” he says. “You are kind, to come back, and think of me. But I can’t leave.” Shōta preemptively sticks his toe in the door, so the man can’t slam it on him. “The way house has to stay open,” he’s almost apologetic about it, his brow creased, wringing his hands. He reaches up, tucks a lock of blond hair back behind one ear. He smiles, and it’s tight. “I made a promise, to my teacher. I have to stay here. You saw it yourself. If I hadn’t been here, you would have died.”

“And if you don’t come back to civilization, _you’ll_ die.”

“I’ll die either way, eventually.”

There is something off about the quiet, pained way he says it. He’s right. Everyone dies eventually. A lot sooner now than they all used to, their corpses growing closer to the afterlife daily, their footsteps dogged by darkness and grave-dirt and the blood dried into red dust under their fingernails. But this is more than that. This is quiet acceptance. This is.

“Thank you,” the man finishes. “But I’ll pass. If you really want to repay me, I would love some batteries and more candles, if there are any to spare. I’m running out.” Shōta wants to hook his arm around the man’s neck and drag him along back to civilization (or what’s left of it, anyway) but refrains. Hesitates.

“Aizawa,” Shōta says. “My name. Aizawa Shōta. I’ll bring you that stuff.”

The man smiles, and it lights up his narrow, sharp-boned face, the hollows of sleeplessness that are bruises and scars beneath his eyes. “Thank you. I’m Yagi Toshinori.”

 

 

5.

 

There are different visitors every time Shōta comes by. Sometimes people needing medical attention, sometimes just those bandits or travelers who have taken the end of the world as the opportunity they needed to leave society forever. Yagi doesn’t care—he opens his doors, and lets them sleep in his front room by his fire, the rest of the house shrouded in darkness and empty, the silence heavy on the old rotten floorboards. He can’t keep it up, he says. There’s not supplies. He can have one good room. That’s good enough for his needs.

Nobody robs him, even when Shōta thinks they should. Nobody robs him, because the world has ended, and there’s still a man at the side of the road with a lantern hanging on the post in front of his house, its glowing yellow light filling the dark like the absent sun. Whenever Shōta goes to see him, he looks a little more tired, a little more wan, like the moon waning back to darkness. His skin is grey and pasty, washed-out. His eyes are red. His hands shake and tremble. But Yagi smiles, laughs, says it’s all fine.

Shōta kisses him for the first time, one day, when he is leaving. Another box of batteries and candles has been traded. Yagi kisses him back, and it’s like he doesn’t really know how—doesn’t remember how the movements are supposed to go, where to press their mouths together. “I’m rusty,” Yagi says, and Shōta ignores him.

Yagi puts down the box, and his hands are just as warm and as soft as Shōta remembers them being, and this time, there is no sting of the needle.

 

 

6.

 

Yagi calls him. Shōta doesn’t remember giving Yagi his cell phone number, but he calls. “Aizawa?” He says, and he coughs as he speaks, little earthquakes that rock Shōta’s world. He’s already unmoored from reality, drifting further and further out like a satellite with a shaky tether daily, and this is just another nail being wrenched out of his feet. He can all-but-smell the blood. “Could you come by here? I need a hand with something.”

Shōta has three hunts he needs to get done and a delivery, all of them urgent. “Of course. I have plenty of time.” He lies. “I’ll swing by later today.”

The wayhouse isn’t actually all that far from Lestallum. In the old days, when the sun still burned in the sky and cast shadows against the ground, it would have been considered—almost a suburb, maybe. A strange place to live, with monsters always roaming the wilds, but safe enough. It’s on a major road, easy to get to, easy to leave. Nowadays, when there’s not been any natural shadows in longer than Shōta can really properly _remember_ , his visual memories getting hazy now that so many years have passed, living in that house is foolhardy at best and suicidal at worst.

But Yagi insists. He can’t leave.

Shōta drives out there, and parks his car off the road, as near to the door as he can be. There’s some small safety in numbers, and they don’t really have a lot of working cars or trucks _left_ , all things considered. A heck of a lot less than they started with. Even with scrap efforts, Cid and Cindy rebuilding things, they’re running out of materials. They can’t make anything now. Factories are all shut down. They have the power plant, and what detritus they have left from their lives before the end, and the meteor shards, and when all that runs out—

Well. At least Shōta is able to find reassurance in the fact that they’ll all go nice and quickly, when the meteor shards run out.

The door opens, and Yagi meets him on the threshold. He’s lost weight.

Shōta can see the black on his eyelids, like eyeliner. The black at his nailbeds. He’s been able to see it for weeks now.

He’s not stupid.

“I need to show you something,” Yagi says, softly.

“Okay,” Shōta says. “So show me.”

 

 

7.

 

His truck is wrecked. His driver is dead. There’s a piece of wood spar buried in his side about two inches under the skin, digging into his muscles and ribs, and he’s lucky it didn’t puncture anything. He’s bleeding. He can’t stand.

Shōta is huddled in the lee of a rock, in the dark oblivion of Lucis After The End, and the wind is screaming, and the rain is howling. He can hear nothing but the weather, the stormwall that is crashing over him again and again like waves. Can’t even hear his own heartbeat, running high in his throat, can just feel it pounding as he digs pressure into his side to keep his body from bleeding out.

When he looks up, squinting, blinking water out of his eyelashes as he stares into the storm for the few brief snippets he can handle before the lashing rain blinds him again, he can see the eyes. Daemon eyes. Red, as far as the eye can see, out in the darkness. They’ve got his scent.

They’re waiting. Soon enough, they’ll come for him. He’ll be another blacked out name on another blacked out ledger. Another name carved into a brick on the Lestallum court, another dead body nobody will ever find or ever bury. A memory, hardly worth his brief time on Eos.

He doesn’t want to die.

 _He doesn’t want to die_.

He howls it into the storm, and the wind whips it away into silence.

 

 

8.

 

Yagi takes him up the stairs. Their footsteps ring out hollow, echoing doing into the cupboard below. Yagi takes them very slowly. He’s not young, Shōta knows this. But he’s not old, either. He’s somewhere indeterminately in middle age, with his body failing him faster than it’s supposed to as one by one his organs go to grey and black and stop functioning, as the Scourge takes him.

Yagi won’t live to see the dawn—but then again, who will?

“I’m sorry,” Yagi says, out of breath, when they reach the top landing. Shōta takes his elbow, not wanting to overstep himself. Yagi corrects it, takes his hand. Yagi’s fingers, long and warm, are chilly against Shōta’s palm. Cold and still, like they both soon will be. “I thought I could make it a little longer. But it’s…it’s gone on so long now.” His voice is hoarse, pained, ragged.

He closes his eyes, and Shōta squeezes his hand.

“Scourge,” he says it, tastes it on his tongue. “You’re dying.”

Yagi looks at him, and he smiles, and his eyes are all wrong. They’ve always been all wrong, Shōta has always known they were wrong. People don’t have eyes like that. The closest he’s ever seen are Marshal Leonis’ eyes, but they are just pale. Not bright, not like this. Yagi’s almost glow.

“I’m sorry,” Yagi says again, and crosses the hallway. He comes to a door, his feet making no noise on the rotten floorboards, decayed away to dust and age. His feet hardly touch them.

Shōta can’t follow him. Yagi opens the door.

Inside, there’s a daemon, as vast as the sky. “I had managed to stay out of the front room,” Yagi says. “That was where my Master slept, and something about her memory kept it sacrosanct. As long as that was still whole, I could hang on, a little longer.” He coughs, and it’s not blood that comes out of his mouth. “But I was wrong. It’s just so dark, Shōta. I can’t do it any more.”

Of course.

Nobody can heal the Scourge, not any more.

Shōta nods. “You’re going to lose control.” Become a daemon. He’s seen it happen to plenty of people before. Everyone has. They’ve all watched the Scourge slowly eat people alive from the inside out. More, these last few years. There’s no Oracle, no sun to burn it off for a few hours each day. It just festers, like gangrene, poisoning a wound. No disinfectant. Kills you anyway long after the scar’s healed closed.

“Yes,” Yagi says, and when he looks at Shōta, his sclera are all black. Black, black, black. “I’m sorry.” There’s no other light aside from the candle downstairs, and it casts golden highlights into his hair and shadows darker than the spot where the moon used to be into the cuts of his cheekbones. He smiles, and it’s sad and lonely and cold.

He looks so thin and scared, standing in that great old doorway. The frame is shorter than he is, but somehow it only makes him look smaller. He’s a shadow of a man living in a shadow of a world, and his clothes are falling off his narrow frame and his bones don’t look like they can hold him up and Shōta can do _nothing at all_.

“I’ll keep an eye on it,” Shōta says. “I’ll watch over the house. Put out the light in the window.” When did he gain so much loyalty to this little old ghost, this sad tired man-shaped hole in the night? “The King will come back.” Shōta hasn’t believed this for years, but he says it anyway. Like this time, he will. “And you’ll wake up, healed and yourself again.”

 

 

9.

 

Yagi kisses him, and it tastes like black bile. Cold and acidic and hungry for whatever it is within Shōta that could feed the ghost Yagi is.

“Thank you,” he says.

 

 

10.

 

Huddled in the darkness, shaking as the shock sets in, cold to the bone and soaked to the skin, Shōta gives up. It’s not worth trying to fight it. This is an easier death than a lot of the ones he could be forced to endure. Bleeding out might not be quick, but it’s relatively painless. He’ll fall asleep, and never wake up, and that’ll be that. Easy. Quiet.

And he squints into the storm, and he sees a light.

 

 

11.

 

The lantern hangs from a post at the side of the road. The stone of the post is old—ancient. It’s weather-beaten and water-pocked, no longer squared on the corners like it probably was, once upon a time. The top is domed, the sides rounded into a column. The metal of the ring is rusted, but whole, old and rubbed-shiny by hands.

There’s a lantern hanging from it.

It’s a newer lantern. It’s brass, or something like it, with an electric light inside, the lightbulb glowing yellow, incandescent. It hangs, battered by the rain and wind, swinging wildly back and forth. But it doesn’t go out, doesn’t get blown from its perch.

Shōta touches it, and stares when his fingers actually encounter solid, wet, cold metal. It’s real.

The house at the end of the path is real.

The door at the end of the path is real.

The door opens, and the tallest man Shōta has ever seen, stooped over to keep from cracking his skull on the doorframe, blond hair soaked flat the moment he peeks into the rain, his blue eyes bright in the dark, is real. “Quick!” he says, waving Shōta forward. “Before you get killed!”

 

 

12.

 

Shōta keeps the lantern on, and the caution tape up over the door of the abandoned house. It peels off sometimes in bad weather, and he sticks it back up. The lantern runs on batteries he trades his rations for. The roof has caved in, and even just taping up the door, he can feel something inside.

It’s not malicious. Just an old ghost, waiting to come out.

Every time he’s done, he presses his hands to the door. Watches the glow and burn of the light out of the corner of his eye, a beacon to bring them all home, and says—

“Soon, Toshinori.”

Soon.

**Author's Note:**

> social media @jonphaedrus


End file.
